‘Can you speak Russian? No? So why go to the theatre when you can’t understand a word?’ My challenger (English) was incredulous that I’d asked one of the Russian helpers on the British Council tour, whose mother had been a principal dancer with the Kirov, to find me, if at all possible, a ticket to a play. There was a performance of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry, she’d told me. The legendary Alla Demidova would be performing; the director was Kirill Serebrennikov, a daring force in the Russian avant-garde; and it would be taking place in the Gogol Centre, a former warehouse designed in industrial cool with gorgeous Constructivist lettering that makes the word Гоголь look like the limbs of an Alexandra Exter puppet.

It was the premiere, packed with an alternative-looking, very stylish crowd. Demidova drifted inconsequentially onto the stage, then struck a pose, raised her head, stiffened her back, extended her jewelled hands, and became the Akhmatova of the portraits and the photographs. Her performance was dramatising some of the best known raging laments: ‘Requiem’, ‘Northern Elegies’, ‘Poem without a Hero’. Ferocious music rose from the three harps on stage, drums and a huge gong; behind her, montages of newsreels and photographs flickered – there was Stalin giving a speech, looking much younger than usual, there were trudging marchers, refugees on icefloes, bombs, wreckage, more ice, more wretches in the long desperate siege of Leningrad, the stirring hopes, the dashed hopes, the dead and dying. Demidova was proclaiming: her Akhmatova was an angel of history, a witness and chronicler of terrible times, of her own sufferings and many others’, her savaged country’s elegist and funeral orator.

Suddenly a glorious idol of a girl appeared: a dancing soubrette in scarlet lipstick, a short skating skirt and black stockings, with a star halo radiating in spikes from her head. Was this Akhmatova’s double, her inner self, her child-soul, ‘the visitor from the wrong side of the mirror’? Perhaps she was the answer to the question:

What miracle do you see in a Siberian blizzard?
What shimmering mirage around the circle of the moon?

As I watched, and the torrent of Russian tumbled over me, I didn’t struggle. I let it carry me as here and there a word – usually a proper noun (Hamlet, Paris, Neva, Don) – glinted in the spate. Then, after nearly two hours, without a break and without once leaving the stage, Demidova dropped her head into her hands and lapsed into silence; the lights went out and the house erupted in a standing ovation. The whole experience was dreamlike and fragmented, but filled with tableaux of far more lucid brilliance than any dream.

If you can enjoy opera and dance – and music when you haven’t a clue, like me – it is not so different to go to a play in a language you don’t understand. The fashion for – the insistence on –supertitles has made librettos more important while listening to opera than they used to be, I think. I find my eyes stray up to read and I miss what’s happening on stage. At William Kentridge’s production of Lulu recently at the ENO, I kept being distracted by the complicated script scrolling above, when I should have let myself drop into the layers of his mise-en-scène.

Incidentally, Lulu made clear how deeply Kentridge is steeped in the Russians of the revolutionary generation – Eisenstein, Moholy-Nagy. In St Petersburg, where I went after Moscow, I stayed in the Hotel Angleterre where the poet Sergei Yesenin killed himself; he was the poet who was Isadora Duncan’s lover, and I mention this only because Edward Gordon Craig, another of her lovers, was the stage designer who pioneered graphic abstraction on stage in Europe and America. He was another living presence in the production at the Gogol.

Unintelligibility has become interesting to me as a far more common state – with its own benefits – than has been recognised. Some of the most involving and passionate moments of a reading life can be baffling. In my first encounters with Rebecca, The Waste Land, Waiting for Godot, Dante’s Paradiso, I could grasp very little of what was being said, either at the level of the words or in the larger picture of narrative and thought. Yet these works absorbed me utterly, and their feel has remained vivid in memory; they felt intense and alive and their power is and was contagious – they made me feel intense and alive too. There’s something about attending to a work beyond lucidity that’s like learning a language when young, or finding your way around a neighbourhood.

The pleasures of unintelligibility have been wonderfully explored by nonsense poets and storytellers like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, and some of the greatest makers of such literature have been Russian: Velimir Khlebnikov, for example. Khlebnikov revelled in the sound of words and in the feelings that the sheer noise of plosives, gutturals and fricatives could excite, when arranged in patterns and rhythms, without much design on semantic translucency:

Comments

A couple of years ago I was in Rijeka, where the Zagreb Experimental Theatre was performing Hamlet (in Croatian). Although I have perhaps ten words of Croatian I thought it would be easy enough to follow. In fact it was experimental enough that I could tell which characters were which (Gertrude and Ophelia were played by the same woman, and as I recall one actor played the ghost, the gravedigger, Polonius and Fortinbras), but the drastic reworking of the plot was another matter. I would have to say it was one of the most riveting performances of anything that I’ve ever seen. If anything, being unable to follow the dialogue meant that the interpretation of the story as a brutal power struggle, in which Hamlet gradually loses support while Claudius gains it, was all the more convincing.

I am baffled by politics now, when it used to be like table football with a blue team and a red team. This is, indeed, like being a small child, not quite knowing whether the adults are arguing, agreeing, laughing or mad.

“Bo-beh-o-bi, sang the lips” and the following lines are metrically convenient but grammatically problematic translations. Khlebnikov is using a reflexive form of the verb “to sing,” uncommon in this context. To render it correctly in English, one could say “the lips sang themselves,” as in “created themselves” or “shaped themselves” or “colored themselves.” Another translation option is the passive voice: “the lips were sung,” since the Russian reflexive also allows for this interpretation.

It is a short poem so worth quoting in full, including the concluding two lines:

Thus on a canvas of certain correspondences,
Beyond expanse [or duration], there lived a Face.

The poem is not as improvisatory as it seems at first sight, although it is undoubtedly idiosyncratic. Rather, it seems an attempt at illustrating synesthetic perception. Consider baw-beh-AW-bee, for the lips: b is a labial, and Khlebnikov felt it was intensely red. G was yellow, z golden to him: a golden necklace.

Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” come to mind, although Khlebnikov only mentioned Baudelaire and Mallarmé as influences. Also, Khlebnikov must have taken Cubism very seriously. He wrote:

“There exists a certain… indefinitely expanded multiformity, continually changing, which occupies the same position relative to our five senses as a two-dimensional continuous space occupies relative to a triangle, to a circle…”

Certainly Kurt Schwitters (* 1887, Hannover, Germany; + 1948 in Kendal, Cumbria, England) and his ‘Ursonate’ belongs to this artistic league of the pleasures of unintelligibility as well.

Thanks to Marina Warner for her mention of fascinating Sergei Yesenin (1895-1925), who indeed was for a short period married to Isadora Duncan – as well as to three other women (fathering four children) in his short life of 30 years: seams of yet ‘undiscovered’ drama for future operas, movies, novels…

Several years ago I took a group of sixth formers to The Tempest in Russian. It turned out to be brilliant, especially for making them realise the physical nature of theatre and how storytelling happens in action as well as through language. Also made all of us consider the extent of sound symbolism across languages as some sounds punched through any language barriers.

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